New to ubuntu - some problems/questions

[José Vilmar Estácio de Souza]

Hi Daniel,
I'll try to answer some questions, but first I've some questions.
What version of ubuntu are you running?
Are you running unity 2d or unity 3d?

See my answers below your questions.



>
> 1. How do I see the list of all my applications? I press the windows key
> and then attempt to arrow around, but this does not work. I read that
> this is the method to view the entire application list with unity...
> So how to do this with orca?

The win key or the alt+f1 is used to see the list of the prefered 
applications or the running applications.
I never found how to se all applications using unity 2d.

> Also, on a bit of a side note, what is a better choice from an
> accessibility point of view, gnome-shell or unity? Is there some reason
> why unity is the default on ubuntu?

Personally I prefer gnome-shell, but canonical decided to adopt unity as 
the default.

> 2. In Some applications are not working quite right. In Libreoffice calc
> when I use the arrow keys to navigate the spread sheet I do not get any
> spoken feedback from orca.
> Also in both writer and calc (possibly other apps, but that's all I've
> tested so far) I can not access the menu bar by using alt or alt+f.
> Is there a solution to this one?
Did you try the f10 key to access the menu bar?

> 3. I've just installed emacspeak from source on ubuntu, using
> espeak. When I run emacspeak with espeak I experience regular crashes on
> average one every few minutes.
> Obviously this is quite annoying, so I was hoping there might be a fix
> around.
> I'm also experiencing almost identical problem on debian, but my best
> solution so far is to revert back to alsa. Is this also the best
> solution for ubuntu?
I can not say about this topic, but I think that it is not so easy 
revert to alsa in ubuntu.

> I'm presuming this will also be an issue when I get around to installing
> speakup, as it was on debian also.
>
> 4. My final problem: I'm attempting to build and install speakup as
> kernel modules.
> First I tried installing module-assistant and doing the following as
> root:
> m-a prepare
> m-a a-i speakup
>
> The build process failed though. Is my best option for now to build the
> modules from source out of git?
>
you do not need build speakup in ubuntu because there is  a package.
sudo apt-get install speakup espeakup

This will generate some errors but you can ignore them.

The problem is that you can not use speakup and the gui environment 
using the same login.
What I do in general is to login in the console as root and su - my real 
login.

> If anyone can help with any of this I'd grately appreciate it.
> I hope this can help in some way.
> Thanks in advance,
> Daniel
>

-- 
{}S José Vilmar Estácio de Souza